November 2009
Psychological Obesity →
There is a thought-provoking idea in pretty much every section of this danah boyd talk but this bit especially leapt out at me:
“People consume content that stimulates their mind and senses. That which angers, excites, energizes, entertains, or otherwise creates an emotional response. This is not always the “best” or most informative content, but that which triggers a...
Of course I bet there’s a Wikipedia page which renders that whole post redundant.
Methods Of Collective List-Making
For a “Top albums of the year” list, say. Assume you know who you want to participate.
FREE VOTING: All participants name a number of things, and their votes are tallied to produce an ordered list. This is probably the most common way of making a list, and the most common variant is for participants to order their lists to produce a standardised weighting. Other variants include...
Unmade ILX post
Saying “There is no ‘broader culture’ to have a sense about” is sort of missing the point, in that like the existence of God, what matters is whether or not people ACT as if there’s a broader culture to have a sense about.
(The analogy isn’t perfect, since the existence of a broader culture is testable, and also since if enough people act like a broader culture...
The half-mile wide web page →
I have only been able to spot two planets so far :(
Numbers
Here’s the results of the Twitter/Tumblr “Best Kraftwerk Track” poll. YOU BIG ROBOT EMOS.
(NB songs are listed in English but often the votes were for the German version so imagine them that way if you like)
8 VOTES: NEON LIGHTS
7 VOTES: Autobahn, Trans Europe Express
4 VOTES: Computer Love, Tour De France
3 VOTES: Numbers, The Model
2 VOTES: Metal On Metal
1 VOTE: Aero...
The 50 Most Interesting Articles On Wikipedia →
These are not actually the 50 most interesting articles on Wikipedia. But they are 50 Wikipedia articles which sustain a high rate of interest and that’s good enough for several joyfully lost hours.
Via @peteashton on Twitter.
Down with the kids
Like many people half my age, I have a formspring. http://www.formspring.me/tomewing
I don’t have any kind of purpose for it, or motivation, other than “I’ll sign up for anything”, obviously.
“Did Nin feel guilty about any of this? If so, she had a ready excuse: she was an...”
– nin (via melissa.tumblr.com) (via douglaswolk)
This - more than somewhat critical, perhaps also unfair - portrait of Anais Nin kind of makes me want to see a schlocky film or miniseries mixing biopics of Nin and Ayn Rand. (I’m not the first to have had this thought.)
Rated R →
Rihanna is not the first superstar to have made a deliberately difficult album; Rated R is the latest in a proud history of implausibly cold, alienated and deeply personal works that includes Madonna’s Erotica,Janet Jackson’s Velvet Rope and, more recently, Kelly Clarkson’s My December and Kanye West’s808s & Heartbreak. What makes Rated R impressive and important beyond...
Selling Brains →
I felt I needed a label because I wanted to sell my brain. If I could package my brain up in a nice tidy product then I could stick a price on it and people would be more likely to buy it. And, to a certain extent, it worked – I’ve made a pretty decent living over the last couple of years – yet every time I describe myself as a Social Media Consultant a tiny part of me dies.
I can’t even...
Don't let's be beastly to the Germans
OK, what’s the best Kraftwerk track?
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-11-22) →
Bob Dylan (18)
Kraftwerk (16)
Keri Hilson (15)
Neon Indian (11)
Saint Etienne (11)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
I endorse all these artists except for Neon Indian, who are dreadful.
Decade's End II: This Time It's Serious →
Frank Kogan is writing a decade-end essay and wants to know what ideas are floating around out there. Go help!
The thread already contains this - really terrific - point by girlboymusic:
The arc of pop music is long, but it bends toward weirdness. We started the decade with relatively neat ‘n’ clean stuff from ‘NSync and Britney and the like. And then we had this movement...
“When asked about the similarity, Mr. Young said the Postal Service was never a...”
– Seriously, fuck this Owl City guy in the ear. “Wrote the next chapter”? More like “photocopied someone else’s notes for the exam.” (via maura)
It’s not as if this is a rare strategy though! I mean, it worked for Coldplay - and how many MBV (Not MBV) records have there been in the last 15...
Puzzlements Of 09 #1
How come I find FAT Machine (bar the amazingly terrible “Kiss w/A Fist”) endearing and Bat For Lashes irritating? Even though BFL has more and better ideas?
“Where you used to have quotes from the NME in adverts, now you can have actual...”
– digital rep from Warner Music at the 140 Characters conference in London.
Or: "Get off my lawn, I'm trying to have a...
maura:
Maybe this is another thing about the appeal of this particular music to people who write online — it’s in some ways a reflection? People on all sides are trying to muddle through their creative impulses with tools that allow for instant publishing/dissemination, and by extension the impulse to get something out overtakes the impulse to make something “right” in whatever abstract sense.
...
“The little inconsistencies in musicians’ performances aren’t just glitches,...”
– The Death Of Mistakes Means The Death Of Rock - Monitor Mix Blog : NPR (via desnoise)
This is the same argument Joe Carducci used to use about why dance music sucked - I am actually pretty sympathetic to it (in Wolk’s articulation, not Carducci’s), more than you might expect given...
Roundtable Discussion: The Role Of The Record... →
perpetua:
Carrie Brownstein leads a discussion with label heads from Matador, Merge, Sub Pop, Kill Rock Stars, Jagaguwar, and Saddle Creek. There’s a lot of interesting stuff mixed in with stuff you’ve heard a dozen times before, but the thing that interested me most — almost certainly because I have some involvement in it — is the discussion of how much power Pitchfork has in driving the...
Nixonland Notes
Finished Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland yesterday - a romp of a book, 700 pages of politics and swearing in which, to be honest, very little of “the 60s” comes out well. I don’t really know if Perlstein’s central “Nixonland” metaphor stands up - in fact I don’t really even think I can summarise it that well: that Nixon’s populist politics of...
The Pop World Cup 2010 →
We’re looking for people to play in the 2010 Pop World Cup. Competitive new music discovery! What could be finer? Sign up on Freaky Trigger at the link above.
Murdoch: Google is mortal →
Everyone’s missed the clever part of Rupert Murdoch’s broadside against Google last week. Murdoch said he’d block Google from spidering his websites’ content, and may use litigation against public broadcasters such as the BBC, who use material spawned in his papers. The conventional wisdom from web gurus was that he was off his rocker, and his comments were the last gasp...
Ned Raggett on the end of Idolator →
At the same time, especially with regard to Stylus and Plan B and now Idolator, one finds a slow limiting of a burst of spirit that had had a good decade-long run, of balancing out the passion of writing and thoughtful debate via the vehicle of music — and quite often the subjects under discussion reached far beyond the notes heard and the lyrics comprehended — with an appreciation for the here...
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-11-15) →
Duran Duran (14)
Tempa T (5)
Dizzee Rascal (5)
Rihanna (4)
Yeah Yeah Yeahs (4)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
Word Of The Year FITE →
Without further ado, the 2009 Word of the Year is: unfriend.
unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.
As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.”
There is some controversy over this on Twitter, where a lot of people feel it should be “defriend” or “de-friend”.
Which is it -...
Albums Crowdsourcing Phase II
As ever, I am having a massive year-end albums catch up panic. I put out the call on Twitter for suggestions and got a lot (thank you all very much!). Obviously, the time to even consider any of these between now and the end of the year is limited. So now I turn to you lot: which are good? which are terrible? If I had to acquire only 4 or 5 which should they be? Tell me about these records!
...
My Taste By Genre, 2009
Have just submitted my tracks of 09 list to Pitchfork. I’m not allowed to say what’s on it, or at any rate I’m not going to because the specific tracks (down at the lower end of the top 50 in particular) involve a certain amount of tacticality based on who the list’s for etc.
But I’ve broken it down based by genre because it interests me (and probably nobodt else) to...
Here's THE GAME: Grab the book nearest you. Right...
aceterrier:
cureforbedbugs:
fireengines:
haguenite:
thedisgruntledgradstudent:
hurricane-k:
himandher:
robotlove:
captainkirk:
tumblingnoodle:
taylortallegra:
angelcondom:
lottieeeee:
elharrington:itskelseyyo:phoebejeebies:thisisdiamond:babywhalesforsale:drawingtheline: vibinbby:mr—smith:haileyyy:precarious-peace:raineyday:without-words: livetolove1234:sabinasblog:
...
50 Songs 10 Years →
I need to crack on with my own decade tracks list - have got delayed by needing to think about 09 tracks and albums. Anyway this is Jude Rogers’ blog of the decade, taking a more personal angle (which is pretty refreshing to be honest: one can have enough of general significance.)
Recommend me a blog!
Or a tumblr. For some reason I couldn’t set my previous post as a “question to answer”. So I repeat - what should I be reading?
My Ten Favourite Blogs
These are the sites I enjoy reading the most at the moment, or learn the most from, or laugh at most, or something. They’re in alphabetical order.
A Grammar: This is Nitsuh Abebe’s tumblr, in which he is reasonable about things, Nitsuh-style. If you don’t know Nitsuh, he is a very smart guy who has a remarkable ability to pour the oil of good sense on the troubled waters of ILX...
In Defense Of The Majors →
The argument here seems to be: major labels would love to support better music but nasty reviewers don’t cover it when we do.
On the one hand he’s completely right: the fraction of music that gets written about is astonishingly narrow.
On the other hand a specialist independent label is going to suffer from this more than a major, because (even in these straitened times!) majors have...
Solange Knowles - "Stillness Is The Move" →
This cover does a lot of things good covers do:
- reminds you of what makes the original interesting (the way the DPs’ singers approach notes like a kid approaches stepping stones - each jump to the next an excitement and a risk.)
- puts its own stamp on it (Solange on the other hand takes stillness, and the zen ninja song title, seriously as an idea, gliding across the song with an...
What Can We Expect From RPG Storytelling? →
The monomyth structure works well in role-playing games. The structure of the hero’s journey perfectly fits the RPG structure of character development. It is easy to transform fiction with the structure of the monomyth into a RPG. Which is why there are lots of games based on Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, but no games based on, lets say, Jane Austen novels. A story like Pride and...
Album not actually doomed, maybe, possibly →
Article on CMU covering a conference in Dubai in which music bizzers talked The Death Of The Album. People are still buying music (hooray) but what they’re buying is singles (erm…)
Don’t worry, say attendees, the album is still neccessary, because it structures the rest of the release cycle: promotional bursts, long tours with breaks to write, the cycles of an artist’s...
How Food Preferences Vary by Political Ideology →
treblekicker:
This seems to reveal that conservatives are disgusting unhealthy slobs (30% eat no fresh fruit a week) and whose idea of exotic food is Chinese takeaway (94% WTF?)
Well, no. 27% eat fresh fruit “less often than weekly” - compared to the 21% of liberals who admit this. And a majority of conservatives, just like a majority of liberals, say “pan-asian/French...
Poptimist! →
cureforbedbugs:
tomewing:
There is a new, free (I’m guessing) music magazine in LA called Poptimist. Fans of my Pitchfork column of the same name will find much to entertain and educate them.
I dunno, Bon Iver, Miike Snow, MSTRKRFT, and Cool Kids — doesn’t sound particularly Poptimistic.
Sorry, my fault: I’m too tired to flag sarcasm properly. The writing is so dreadful it’s...
Farewell to the casual music fan →
A long - but worth it - piece taking quizzical aim at Kevin Kelly’s “1000 True Fans” idea, looking not at the individual economics of it so much as the cultural impact of a world where “casual fandom” is a thing of the past.
(I don’t actually buy all these arguments - mainly because I don’t think casual fandom itself is threatened, just casual fandom as...
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-11-8) →
Pet Shop Boys (15)
Kate Bush (13)
Adam Ant (7)
Adam and the Ants (7)
Saint Etienne (4)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
The Anthropology of Banking →
The kind of worker they imagine is a worker like themselves. A worker who is constantly retraining, a worker who is constantly networked, a worker whose skill set is very interchangeable, a worker who thinks of downsizing as a challenge — a worker who thrives on this. This becomes the prototype, but in many ways that’s quite removed from the daily lives of most American workers.
From the...
Twistory Lesson Vol.1: The Causes Of World War I
I asked Twitter, this is what Twitter told me.
“network of badly written treaties stretched to breaking by terrorism in wrong place at wrong time”
“it was all Frank Ferguson’s fault wasn’t it?”
“Imperialism. Militarism. Nationalism. Assassination. Stubborness. Treaties. Train Timetables. Idiocy.”
“Europe gone ham, yeah baloney meat.”
...
